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Sebastian Arnold is a mad scientist drummer, electronica artist, hardware hacker and software developer from Berlin. He is touring as a one-man band and uses his drum kit to interact with sequencers and sythesizers. His music is a danceable mixture of jazz, electronica and post-rock. You can find Sebastian's albums on his own Berlin-based indie label beeah–music, iTunes or Spotify. He is also part of the duo Arnold+Sukroso and is currently working on a new solo album that features his graphical Senode sequencer.

Please see the updated web site for more features and information about this version. There will be more updates coming soon: MIDI bindings (especially for drummers), clock synchronization (for DAW users) and more iOS-related integration.

Today is the release of my new album TELEGRAM EP – a collection of dance tracks from my “mad scientist drummer” solo performance. It contains two new Singles (Impuls and Telegram), two remixes (one is featuring long-time collaborator Jürgen Schwer on guitar) and two remakes of songs that you may already have heard on the “Attemp to change a running system e.p.”. Watch the nice time lapse and slow motion video we did in Berlin:

Thanks to Daniel Kuhn, Buenos Diaz, the video team, Klunkerkranich and Antje Øklesund to make this happen. The release party will take place on 03.09.2016 at Panke. Come over and grab a CD. Looking forward to play in Berlin again!

I am very happy to present you my new music application Senode. Some time ago, I developed a prototype for a finite state machine sequencer, which was so much fun to play that I needed to come up with a productive version. The basic idea of Senode is to draw your entire composition as a cyclic graph of nodes and edges. Each node can generate events, such as notes, chords, effects, or any other MIDI or OSC message. You can now use any incoming signal or a clock to traverse the graph with one or more tokens. There are many interaction options that let you decide the generation, direction, transformation and synchronization of the tokens. At all times, your graphical score is perfectly readable. This makes this sequencer the perfect tool for interactive performance of pre-written and generative music. Let’s have a demo:

I use Senode as the only sequencer in my live setup. All songs are patched inside the program and are controlled via MIDI. I use the G2 Modular to generate clock signals and include signals from my drums to trigger important events on the graph. Senode generates MIDI messages for the Nord Modular G2 and Nord Lead 4R synthesizers and the Pianoteq VST sampler.

A Senode Graph

How I Use It

Short Demo

For more information and a release date, please sign up to the newsletter on the Senode Website at www.senode.org or follow @senode on Twitter. Thanks!

“She Was A Visitor” is a vocal piece written by Robert Ashley in 1967. It is based completely on speech and is performed by one single speaker and number of singers that are divided in chorus groups. Earlier this year, I was attending a course by Nicolas Collins, where I did a recreation of this piece for a performance in the TU Berlin Electronic Studio on 12 speaker multichannel. The result is an attempt to model the chorus digitally using Max, allowing a computer to perform the piece on its own or interactively. You can download a standalone patch below.

PERFORMING “She Was A Visitor”

Start with the speaker by loading a file or click “record” to use your own input

Use the “play” button (or hit the space bar) to start end end the speaker

Each chorus leader will sustain a moment in time if you press the “choose” button

The chorus group will follow the leader if it is switched on using the “note” button

After switching a chorus group off, the sound will slowly decay

The “size” parameter changes the grain size of the chorus, try it!

See the README.txt for keyboard and MIDI mappings

Speakers Elias Emken and Tanja Geke were so kind to provide the speech samples that you can start with. Here is a stereo mixdown of my performance, using the German sentence “Sie liebte den Mond”: